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OCTOBER 1999]Reflections on Treaties and Soft Law 913 ConclusionsSoft law is manifestly a multi-faceted concept, whose relationship to treaties is both subtle and diverse. It presents alternatives to treaties in certain circumstances, at other times it complements them, while also providing different ways of understanding the legal effect of different kinds of treaty. Those who maintain that soft law is simply not law have perhaps missed some of the points made here; moreover those who see a treaty as necessarily having greater legal effect than soft law have perhaps not looked hard enough at the "infinite variety" of treaties, to quote Baxter once more. Soft law in its various forms can of course be abused, but so can most legal forms, and it has generally been more helpful to the process of international law-making than it has been objectionable. It is simply another tool in the professional lawyer's armoury.

The aim of this research is to identify the role that training in EU law and in a foreign language play in the use of EU law by Hungarian judges in domestic proceedings. Judges in the new Member States face the problems of no or inadequate official EU translations of relevant EU law or case‐law. The need to compare the meaning of other language versions therefore comes into play in order that the judges comply with the requirements of Union loyalty in the Treaty on European Union: Hungarian judges are shown to exhibit certain creative responses to these challenges. The approach to the research is based on an examination of the institutional framework for judicial training, a selection of pertinent case‐law of the Hungarian courts as well as interviews with a number of judges involved in the application of EU law in their courts.

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